or maybe that Another-One-man is not my son at all, and nothing to do with me?

§

Last night her feet wouldn’t keep still

and I told her to get out of the bed but she wouldn’t listen.

Instead she laughed, she said it was the poppies running about,

I said What poppies? She said the poppies in the poem, had I forgotten?

And I said of course I hadn’t, but she had—

then I asked her would she tell it to me the way she used to?

Oh certainly, she said,

I’ll give it to you now—

Mad Patsy said, he said to me,

That every morning he could see…

More, I said, there was more of it,

There was something about an angel.

I closed my eyes. An angel walking on the sky—

There, you see,

I can do it as well as you,

and I told her I liked it better than Lord Randall

who was poisoned in the Wildwood by his True Love,

or poor King Sweeney with the curse put on him by a saint,

and she said I was right, and there was all different kinds of madness,

there was Sweeney-mad, Mad-Patsy-glad and plain sad-mad,

and when all’s said and done, she said,

what’s a line or two gone missing, after all—?’

Notes:

Sweeney or Shuibhne: a king, whom legend has it was turned into a bird by the curse of a saint.

Lord Randall: an anonymous ballad, probably from the Scots border-country.

In the Poppy Field: written by the Fenian poet and prose writer, James Stephens, who founded an unnamed organisation which was later to become the IRB.

Kerry Hardie

Kerry Hardie has published seven collections of poetry, her most recent being The Zebra Stood in the Dark (2015) [Bloodaxe Books, U.K.] and a Selected Poems. She has published two novels, (Harper Collins; Little, Brown) and is finishing a third. Her verse play [written with Olivia O’Leary], To Find a Heathen Place and Sound a Bell was broadcast in 2015.